


Fishing for Merlin

by neensz



Series: fisher'verse [6]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-14
Updated: 2015-09-14
Packaged: 2018-04-20 17:57:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4796897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neensz/pseuds/neensz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin's first trip home</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fishing for Merlin

**Author's Note:**

> I may come back and reorder all these later so they're chronological. For now, I'm just content they're up.

<><

I was ten the first time Dad took me out on the boat. It wasn’t the first time I’d been fishing, not even close. I’d had a line in the water since I could waddle down as far as the creek behind our house—but it was the first time I’d ever done it in a way that would get me paid in more than smoked salmon from Kaylee or baked trout for dinner from Mom.

><>

Being the youngest by about six years, I was spoiled beyond belief; I can recognize it now, looking back, but back then I was convinced my life as the youngest of the five children of two still-happily-married parents was the worst of anything, ever.

(I might also have tended towards the melodramatic.)

<><

It didn’t take me long to get back into fishing—my sister Kaylee always said it was in our blood. I wasn’t thinking about that, though, when I drug the crappy-ass pole I’d found in Uncle Gaius’s shed down to the edge of the swamp. I was looking for quiet, for someplace away from all the well-meaning good intentions, away from people who kept getting their feelings all over me.

I was the one who should’ve cared the most, but I was empty and broken and felt wrong surrounded by people trying to make me feel better; the water didn’t care about that. I caught fuck-all that day, but I soon learned the best spots along the edge of the swamp, and then learned how to net crabs and drop pots for crayfish and even got myself a little skiff so I could run some subsistence crab pots.

On the water, I felt normal.

And the change I made bringing my catch to the local market wasn’t bad, either.

><>

My life basically reset when I was 14. My entire family died because Dad was driving drunk, with them all in the truck; everyone except me, because I was grounded. Social Services, or Child Protective Services, or the court, or someone—I wasn’t really tracking at the time, and still don’t remember much; can you really blame me?—sent me to live with my uncle down in Alabama. I suppose I’m lucky he took me in; it was him, or my travel-writer aunt who moves around too much to have a permanent address, which disqualified her in the eyes of pretty much every governmental official ever, as well as the foster care system. So yeah, I guess I was lucky.

But I didn’t deal with it, like, ever. I just checked out, and a new Merlin stepped up. I walled up all the hurt and never talked about it or thought about any of them, and just... became someone else. It was easier. It didn’t hurt.

<><

As soon as I turned 18, I bought myself a plane ticket north and talked my way onto a boat somewhere around Cape Cod. I fished some there, and when the season ended I moved on, trying my hand on different boats, getting experience and growing up some. Not a lot, but some. When I got sick of the shitty weather and the New England accents, I got another plane ticket and headed west, figuring I’d try my hand in the herring fishery down ‘round the San Francisco Bay area.

I bounced around like that for years, heading back to Alabama at least once a year to spend time with my uncle and reconnect with the swamps I’d grown to love over the four years they’d been my refuge. I even channeled some Forrest Gump and worked on a shrimp boat down there for a while, but it was too close to home to stick with it for too long—I needed space, and sometimes it seemed like everybody in Alabama knew me or my uncle.

Needing space was my big excuse for not following my uncle up north, back to my hometown, every summer when he ran his little 32-foot gillnetter in the rivers and bays I’d grown up in.

><>

Stepping off the plane in Anchorage, it was just another city, just another layover. If you’ve seen one international airport, you’ve pretty much seen them all. The sky was blue enough, in the hour or so I spent outside raising my nicotine levels after a nine-and-change-hour ban, that I could’ve been back in SoCal getting ready to fish herring instead of in the Great White North.

Stepping off the plane in King Salmon, though. It was like I’d caught a crab pot straight to the chest. I could barely breathe, my chest was clenching so tight, and I almost fell off the steps leading from the plane down to the tarmac. The last time I was here—well, the last time I can remember that I was here, since I don’t recall much about the few days between the accident and being shipped off to Alabama—I had been drug along after Mom, going to pick up Sam, my other sister, and Bear, my eldest brother, at the airport in preparation for Denny’s, my younger older brother’s, “Congrats on Tricking Them into Giving You a Diploma” (as Sam had dubbed it) celebration the next day, since Kaylee, my eldest sister, had been the only one able to make it to Denny’s graduation.

Grief, ten years delayed, swamped me. I clung to the guard rail of the twin-prop’s steps, unable to let go.

<><

Finally getting out on my uncle’s boat on the Kvichak Bay—the part of Bristol Bay mostly only the locals fish, up by the Naknek River, because the bars and spits shift so much that charts are useless—it felt like I’d finally found something I hadn’t known I’d been searching for. Like something clicked into place in my chest and I was a real boy again.

I scrubbed the tears from my face with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, thanking Christ I was alone on deck, that uncle Gaius was still asleep, composing myself just in time as Gwen tripped her way up the steps of the wheelhouse out onto the deck.

(And wasn’t that a mindfuck. The first mate was a chick with my sister’s middle name, but those and fishing were, thankfully, pretty much the only attributes she shared with my late sister.)

“Clear the deck, greenie,” she twitched her face at me in a way that might have been a smile if it’d had more caffeine, “I gots to pee.”

I gave her a sarcastic salute and ducked inside before she could see my bloodshot eyes. She’d probably tease me as hard as Kaylee ever had if she noticed I’d been crying.

Okay, so maybe she had more in common with my sister than just her name, her gender, and her occupation.

I was finally home again. It was probably too much to hope it wouldn’t come with family.


End file.
